Again, that's not exactly specific, and you offer zero specific solutions. Pick something to help fix and go fix it. Complaining about externalities accomplishes nothing.
A key to successful civil disobedience movements is the ability to clearly articulate specific and realistic goals and allow those goals to be subject to debate. Protesting to stop climate change is like protesting for happiness - it's an aspiration not a policy that can be implemented.
Ok. In advance I will tell you that all the policies required will end up eliminating many many jobs.
1) disposability is an atrocity. The most egregious example is electronic disposability. It would be so easy to make things modular where you just plugged in a new chip but of course that is not profitable, so
1) $500 per unit (cell phone computer tablet etc) disposal tax put into the original price
2) $1 deposit on every jar or bottle in the supermarket, meaning we'd end up back in the days of the old Coke bottles
3) expand this disposability tax to everything, which would end planned obsolescence and discourage conspicuous consumption
4) set prices people pay for gas or any utility in proportion to their income. I've lived in places with plenty of millionaires and they don't give a damn whether gas goes up to 20 bucks a gallon. But if they were paying $150 a gallon they would think about it, which would be the equivalent of you or I paying $8 a gallon, as a proportion of their income.
Ditto for water power and every other service, because from what I've seen the people with major money use the most resources. 1 multi-millionaire can use as many resources as 300 waitresses.
5) if you look at maps of Amtrak or any other public transportation you will see that in many ways America had a much better public transit system in 1922 than it has in 2022. It is totally unreasonable to ask people to get out of their cars if they don't have a viable alternative, a public transit system that runs frequently and is safe, reliable and convenient.
Cars should be like a tool in a toolbox. You don't use the pipe wrench for everything but when you need it you want it there. Most of the time you just use a pair of pliers.
___
For any of that to have any chance of happening you have to take all the people whose jobs have been lost and hire them to do all the work of retrofitting and all sorts of useful things like helping older people, otherwise they are very reasonably going to say "I can't worry about the future. I need to put food on my table for my family now".
This is where having a greater vision and overall plan comes in. Tactics are important in a battle but what is more important is strategy in a war.
Look to how Roosevelt hired people out of the depression with all sorts of programs.
I see lots of socialism and an expansion of government but not so many solutions, though mass transit improvements could help. I don't see much evidence your proposals will do more than spread poverty - which increases suffering and pollution. If your "solution" is mostly government intervention, it's all but sure to fail and lack the public support needed to find support. Pro-scarcity pro-poverty solutions get rejected by most because they mostly just increase suffering.
We can no longer ecologically afford disposability, planned obsolescence or conspicuous consumption, in short we can no longer ecologically afford throwing the planet in the garbage can or putting vast amounts of poisons into our nest.
If the solutions to that sound like socialism, so be it.
I understand your objections to the government and I understand that very often government is corrupted by private interests and... Cancer causing chemicals don't care what our political beliefs are.
Quite honestly I am torn between knowing that a greater vision and authority is needed to make changes and also knowing that that authority will very often act for the worst purposes. I have no use for the Democrat or Republican parties, not Biden, not Trump.
All I am interested in is practical solutions to the problems we face, which is probably why I was a member of the Yang Gang.
One thing I do feel fairly certain about:
Whether it's old school thinking like yours or the Wokeists on the left,
Ideological thinking is what keeps people from finding and implementing practical solutions.
Thinking totalitarianism is necessary to solve some greater threat is ideological and it absolutely gets in the way of progress and everyday solutions. There is no one all-knowing person or entity. Never has been and never will be. You aren't going to make progress telling people that the morons who spent 2 years isolating and masking toddlers can solve the problem if only we give them more control over our lives. it also won't work. Some regulations, sure, but they have had that for years. It didn't stop DuPont from polluting the world from a very dirty plant in WV. If government had enforced the law to make DuPont actually pay it might have sent a message, but like all governments., the people running it want power, not solutions.
I lived in the woods for over a year of my life, spent many hours in college in environmental science classes, and read an average of 20 hours a week on environmental issues. We need to make progress one specific lace and action at a time. These doomsday predictions are silly and no amount of traffic stopping, or outright terrorism, is going to get people on board. It's only going to cause chaos and misery.
I'm not sacrificing my children for your fear. Most parents wont.
I can totally understand your sentiments and the last thing I want is totalitarianism.
It may be that this civilization is doomed, because on the one hand a totalitarian government would be far more likely to do the wrong thing than the right thing and simply serve the interests of the super rich and on the other hand the people of the society seem unable to understand that business is usual is a guarantee that it's all going to end very badly and perhaps not that far in the future.
If it end's badly in our lifetime it won't be from everyday people creating too much trash or driving too many vehicles or flying on a planes too often - it'll be from power hungry idiots in government stumbling into a nuclear war with assured global destruction.
I'm somebody who used to be a solid believer that man was the cause of climate change. Obviously there is a lot of climate change happening, but now I'm more of the opinion that there are natural cycles and we are doing everything we can to make it worse.
I don't like fanaticism but ...
As someone who believes that we are destroying ourselves ecologically in a whole variety of ways, oceans fished out, loss of soil nutrition, deforestation, beautiful mountains destroyed by strip mining...
the list goes on and on.
As someone who in my own small way has been trying to get this message out to people for 40 years, it is very very clear that nobody listens unless it's really shoved right in their face. We would still be in Vietnam and black people would still be banned from lunch counters without the widespread protests and activism that made it change.
Protests like this may cause people to get angry, but it seems like that's the only thing that will get people's attention because rising cancer and autism rates and all kinds of other health problems don't seem to be getting their attention, not to mention all the problems associated with GMOs and EMFs. And let's not forget the mass extinctions going on at this moment.
Many human beings are basically very short-sighted, built to respond to the tiger in the jungle but not long term threats.
Really what we need is respect for nature and an understanding that we are part of the web of life. Even if we are the crown of creation of some people believe, we still need to treat the rest of creation in a wise and compassionate way, which we are not doing.
So, as distasteful as it is for me to see protests like this desecrating great art, I have to confess to having some sympathy for it because just continuing business as usual is just continuing down the road to destruction.
I disagree. People ignore the climate alarmists, even in our faces, on the basic grounds that absolutely nothing the climate alarmists propose will address any of those ecological concerns. Climate alarmists are some of the most ecologically destructive people in the west. We might be having a different discussion if these morons weren't ecologically destructive anti-human, anti-environment zealots, but they are, and they are drowning out important conversations about decreasing biodiversity and crap ton of environmentally destructive pollution.
The degradation of soil in global farmlands is a problem - solutions are found in everything from crop rotation to crushing up rocks and sprinkling to 100s of other solutions. The climate activists are shutting down the most advanced farms with the best soil management on Earth (see Denmark and New Zealand).
On the one hand I agree with you. A lot of climate activists are morons.
And.. in the larger sense, how do we realize that we are utterly dependent on our environment and that we can't just keep doing whatever we want and survive. We act like resources are infinite and the ability of the earth to transmute any poisons we put into it are infinite. That is functionally insane.
What would you think of somebody who on the one hand was pissing through a vast inheritance as fast as they could and on the other hand was systematically shitting in all parts of their house?
I met some economy professors, said to them that any economic system not based in physical reality is doomed to destruction. They had no answer.
Business as usual is slow suicide for all of us and maybe not as slow as we would wish.
They had no response because you were whining. Complaining about a problem without offering a solution is called whining.
I disagree with your assessment, moreover, you have yet to articulate any clear and realistic solutions, so I am not sure how any good comes from the complaining.
I am all for ecological conservation. I find hunting organizations and coastal habitat restoration groups have actual solutions to actual problems and the work they do actually improves the environment in the areas they focus. 4Ocean is a fun profitable twist on ocean clean up, the bracelets are neat and who doesn't like a good Yeti?
Laying down in the street or being a doomsayer doesn't accomplish anything. Climate activists yelling at me about my (brand new very efficient) SUV or blocking my route to get my kids from school, is not going to elicit any sympathy from anyone because there isn't a point to their complaining. There isn't a goal. It's just being a jerk to be a jerk.
The solution is that we live simply so we can simply live. As close to zero waste and zero pollution as we can get.
A sane, sustainable economy instead of unrestrained greed and destruction under the control of a few thousand billionaires.
A basic way of living totally unlike our current economy.
I agree with you that a lot of the current climate activists are simply reacting emotionally and haven't thought through many of the things they call for
and...as someone who has been talking about the environment for 40 years, I can tell you that most people are happy to put a Band-Aid on an ax wound as long as it's sugar-coated enough, but very few are willing to acknowledge the total change that is needed in the way we run our economy for our species to survive.
I don't like a lot of these protesters and a lot of the things they're doing and I also know that there is no way Society is going to wake up until it is shoved in their face in a very unpleasant manner. Polite activism rarely works, the squeaky wheel gets the grease
That's ideological babble not a clearly articulated concrete solutions...................... "Live simply" is an undefinable aspiration. "Unrestrained greed" is an undefinable prerogative.
Again, people listen to well-articulated specific proposals. Recycle cardboard and aluminum - its specific, attainable, and there is a process to do it. Heck, even "buy organic" means something.
No amount of playing in traffic or throwing soup at artwork is going to solve anything unless an actual solution, that is realistic and can withstand debate, is proposed. You have yet to do that. The protesters have yet to that. It's a bunch of demanding grease but the wheel is nowhere to be found.
I understand what you're saying and and I understand your frustration with the protesters.
Apple trees grow apples. If you want something other than apples, you need a different tree, you can't just prune the branches a certain way.
I am not just talking about climate change, which I think is already so far advanced that the best we can do is mute the effects, especially since I think a lot of it is due to natural cycles. Still it is incumbent on us to do everything we can.
There are a whole host of other issues which climate change has sucked all the attention from but which are still essential to our survival as a society.
My point is that we need ecological sustainability as the underlying principle of any economy. All the details will logically flow from that. If we really adopt that as an underlying principle, then our whole economic system, (whether it's capitalism, socialism or communism, they're all materialism), is in conflict with that and needs to change, meaning we need a totally different way of going about how we do things. If we don't do it for ourselves nature will do it for us.
You can put all the protesters in jail and silence them but that's not going to make all the serious problems of the world ecological situation go away. The protesters may be a massive pain in the ass but I'm not sure how else anybody is going to start thinking about the real problems of the ecology because as long as they are left in peace most people will simply ignore the problems, or at best give lip service to them.
The very first lesson anybody teaches a child is that you can't do everything you want and get away with it. We need to learn that as a species, This Society needs a strong dose of vision and wisdom.
Then focus on giving people concrete solutions and dispelling bad ideas with facts. Progress is not found in wishes and wants nor is it accomplished in an instant. I find that if I articulate something specific to people, they listen. Most people try, particularly conservatives, because conserving the Earth is part of being conservative. Complaining in generalities doesn't accomplish anything and laying down in traffic to complain in generalities only annoys people.
When my son was 5, he gave some adult a great life lesson and a great story for me to exemplify my point. We were in SoCal for a month for him to have an operation for a rare condition. Ever met those kids with encyclopedic knowledge about a particular subject? That's him about biosystems throughout Earth's history. We stayed where the LA River dumps into the Pacific. To say the amount of trash and smog that surrounded us in SoCal was shocking is an understatement. It still hurts our hearts.
Anyway, he wanted to do something, so he got this huge stick and started pulling plastic bags from the mouth of the river as they flowed by. I grabbed them from his stick and threw them away. Some grumpy couple in their early 20's walked by and they guy looked at him and said, "there isn't a point in what you are doing, it's not going to change anything." My son calmly looked him directly in the eye and said, "that sea turtle I just saved disagrees with you."
No one person can save the planet. No amount of temper tantrums accomplishes anything. But every day, in or own way, we can each save one sea turtle, and together we accomplish a lot.
Setting an example matters. Stop focusing on what you think everyone else "should" be doing and focus on what you can accomplish yourself. Its more productive and far more rewarding.
Your implication is that our mere existence is destroying the planet. You first on solving that problem..............
"Your implication is that our mere existence is destroying the planet"
--
No, not our mere existence...our unwise, destructive actions that are resulting in a massive ecological murder-suicide
Any specifics?
Mass extinctions
Deforestation
Oceans fished out
Loss of soil nutrition
Mountain tops raised by strip mining
Desertification
The list goes on and on and of course there's always climate change, which to at least to some extent we are making worse
Again, that's not exactly specific, and you offer zero specific solutions. Pick something to help fix and go fix it. Complaining about externalities accomplishes nothing.
A key to successful civil disobedience movements is the ability to clearly articulate specific and realistic goals and allow those goals to be subject to debate. Protesting to stop climate change is like protesting for happiness - it's an aspiration not a policy that can be implemented.
Ok. In advance I will tell you that all the policies required will end up eliminating many many jobs.
1) disposability is an atrocity. The most egregious example is electronic disposability. It would be so easy to make things modular where you just plugged in a new chip but of course that is not profitable, so
1) $500 per unit (cell phone computer tablet etc) disposal tax put into the original price
2) $1 deposit on every jar or bottle in the supermarket, meaning we'd end up back in the days of the old Coke bottles
3) expand this disposability tax to everything, which would end planned obsolescence and discourage conspicuous consumption
4) set prices people pay for gas or any utility in proportion to their income. I've lived in places with plenty of millionaires and they don't give a damn whether gas goes up to 20 bucks a gallon. But if they were paying $150 a gallon they would think about it, which would be the equivalent of you or I paying $8 a gallon, as a proportion of their income.
Ditto for water power and every other service, because from what I've seen the people with major money use the most resources. 1 multi-millionaire can use as many resources as 300 waitresses.
5) if you look at maps of Amtrak or any other public transportation you will see that in many ways America had a much better public transit system in 1922 than it has in 2022. It is totally unreasonable to ask people to get out of their cars if they don't have a viable alternative, a public transit system that runs frequently and is safe, reliable and convenient.
Cars should be like a tool in a toolbox. You don't use the pipe wrench for everything but when you need it you want it there. Most of the time you just use a pair of pliers.
___
For any of that to have any chance of happening you have to take all the people whose jobs have been lost and hire them to do all the work of retrofitting and all sorts of useful things like helping older people, otherwise they are very reasonably going to say "I can't worry about the future. I need to put food on my table for my family now".
This is where having a greater vision and overall plan comes in. Tactics are important in a battle but what is more important is strategy in a war.
Look to how Roosevelt hired people out of the depression with all sorts of programs.
___
There are a few starters for you
I see lots of socialism and an expansion of government but not so many solutions, though mass transit improvements could help. I don't see much evidence your proposals will do more than spread poverty - which increases suffering and pollution. If your "solution" is mostly government intervention, it's all but sure to fail and lack the public support needed to find support. Pro-scarcity pro-poverty solutions get rejected by most because they mostly just increase suffering.
We can no longer ecologically afford disposability, planned obsolescence or conspicuous consumption, in short we can no longer ecologically afford throwing the planet in the garbage can or putting vast amounts of poisons into our nest.
If the solutions to that sound like socialism, so be it.
I understand your objections to the government and I understand that very often government is corrupted by private interests and... Cancer causing chemicals don't care what our political beliefs are.
Quite honestly I am torn between knowing that a greater vision and authority is needed to make changes and also knowing that that authority will very often act for the worst purposes. I have no use for the Democrat or Republican parties, not Biden, not Trump.
All I am interested in is practical solutions to the problems we face, which is probably why I was a member of the Yang Gang.
One thing I do feel fairly certain about:
Whether it's old school thinking like yours or the Wokeists on the left,
Ideological thinking is what keeps people from finding and implementing practical solutions.
Thinking totalitarianism is necessary to solve some greater threat is ideological and it absolutely gets in the way of progress and everyday solutions. There is no one all-knowing person or entity. Never has been and never will be. You aren't going to make progress telling people that the morons who spent 2 years isolating and masking toddlers can solve the problem if only we give them more control over our lives. it also won't work. Some regulations, sure, but they have had that for years. It didn't stop DuPont from polluting the world from a very dirty plant in WV. If government had enforced the law to make DuPont actually pay it might have sent a message, but like all governments., the people running it want power, not solutions.
I lived in the woods for over a year of my life, spent many hours in college in environmental science classes, and read an average of 20 hours a week on environmental issues. We need to make progress one specific lace and action at a time. These doomsday predictions are silly and no amount of traffic stopping, or outright terrorism, is going to get people on board. It's only going to cause chaos and misery.
I'm not sacrificing my children for your fear. Most parents wont.
I can totally understand your sentiments and the last thing I want is totalitarianism.
It may be that this civilization is doomed, because on the one hand a totalitarian government would be far more likely to do the wrong thing than the right thing and simply serve the interests of the super rich and on the other hand the people of the society seem unable to understand that business is usual is a guarantee that it's all going to end very badly and perhaps not that far in the future.
If it end's badly in our lifetime it won't be from everyday people creating too much trash or driving too many vehicles or flying on a planes too often - it'll be from power hungry idiots in government stumbling into a nuclear war with assured global destruction.
I'm somebody who used to be a solid believer that man was the cause of climate change. Obviously there is a lot of climate change happening, but now I'm more of the opinion that there are natural cycles and we are doing everything we can to make it worse.
I don't like fanaticism but ...
As someone who believes that we are destroying ourselves ecologically in a whole variety of ways, oceans fished out, loss of soil nutrition, deforestation, beautiful mountains destroyed by strip mining...
the list goes on and on.
As someone who in my own small way has been trying to get this message out to people for 40 years, it is very very clear that nobody listens unless it's really shoved right in their face. We would still be in Vietnam and black people would still be banned from lunch counters without the widespread protests and activism that made it change.
Protests like this may cause people to get angry, but it seems like that's the only thing that will get people's attention because rising cancer and autism rates and all kinds of other health problems don't seem to be getting their attention, not to mention all the problems associated with GMOs and EMFs. And let's not forget the mass extinctions going on at this moment.
Many human beings are basically very short-sighted, built to respond to the tiger in the jungle but not long term threats.
Really what we need is respect for nature and an understanding that we are part of the web of life. Even if we are the crown of creation of some people believe, we still need to treat the rest of creation in a wise and compassionate way, which we are not doing.
So, as distasteful as it is for me to see protests like this desecrating great art, I have to confess to having some sympathy for it because just continuing business as usual is just continuing down the road to destruction.
I disagree. People ignore the climate alarmists, even in our faces, on the basic grounds that absolutely nothing the climate alarmists propose will address any of those ecological concerns. Climate alarmists are some of the most ecologically destructive people in the west. We might be having a different discussion if these morons weren't ecologically destructive anti-human, anti-environment zealots, but they are, and they are drowning out important conversations about decreasing biodiversity and crap ton of environmentally destructive pollution.
The degradation of soil in global farmlands is a problem - solutions are found in everything from crop rotation to crushing up rocks and sprinkling to 100s of other solutions. The climate activists are shutting down the most advanced farms with the best soil management on Earth (see Denmark and New Zealand).
Let's see what these climate people promote:
Lead - ecologically destructive (solar panels)
Lithium mining - Ecologically destructive (batteries)
Windmills - Ecologically destructive
Neodymium mining - ecologically destructive
What do they hate:
Natural gas and nuclear!!
Hypocrites getting in people's faces is just annoying no matter what semantics gymnastics are used by the hypocrites to justify it.
Here's a beautiful example of polite activism. How much have you seen change as a result of this
https://youtu.be/9GorqroigqM
On the one hand I agree with you. A lot of climate activists are morons.
And.. in the larger sense, how do we realize that we are utterly dependent on our environment and that we can't just keep doing whatever we want and survive. We act like resources are infinite and the ability of the earth to transmute any poisons we put into it are infinite. That is functionally insane.
What would you think of somebody who on the one hand was pissing through a vast inheritance as fast as they could and on the other hand was systematically shitting in all parts of their house?
I met some economy professors, said to them that any economic system not based in physical reality is doomed to destruction. They had no answer.
Business as usual is slow suicide for all of us and maybe not as slow as we would wish.
They had no response because you were whining. Complaining about a problem without offering a solution is called whining.
I disagree with your assessment, moreover, you have yet to articulate any clear and realistic solutions, so I am not sure how any good comes from the complaining.
I am all for ecological conservation. I find hunting organizations and coastal habitat restoration groups have actual solutions to actual problems and the work they do actually improves the environment in the areas they focus. 4Ocean is a fun profitable twist on ocean clean up, the bracelets are neat and who doesn't like a good Yeti?
Laying down in the street or being a doomsayer doesn't accomplish anything. Climate activists yelling at me about my (brand new very efficient) SUV or blocking my route to get my kids from school, is not going to elicit any sympathy from anyone because there isn't a point to their complaining. There isn't a goal. It's just being a jerk to be a jerk.
The solution is that we live simply so we can simply live. As close to zero waste and zero pollution as we can get.
A sane, sustainable economy instead of unrestrained greed and destruction under the control of a few thousand billionaires.
A basic way of living totally unlike our current economy.
I agree with you that a lot of the current climate activists are simply reacting emotionally and haven't thought through many of the things they call for
and...as someone who has been talking about the environment for 40 years, I can tell you that most people are happy to put a Band-Aid on an ax wound as long as it's sugar-coated enough, but very few are willing to acknowledge the total change that is needed in the way we run our economy for our species to survive.
I don't like a lot of these protesters and a lot of the things they're doing and I also know that there is no way Society is going to wake up until it is shoved in their face in a very unpleasant manner. Polite activism rarely works, the squeaky wheel gets the grease
That's ideological babble not a clearly articulated concrete solutions...................... "Live simply" is an undefinable aspiration. "Unrestrained greed" is an undefinable prerogative.
Again, people listen to well-articulated specific proposals. Recycle cardboard and aluminum - its specific, attainable, and there is a process to do it. Heck, even "buy organic" means something.
No amount of playing in traffic or throwing soup at artwork is going to solve anything unless an actual solution, that is realistic and can withstand debate, is proposed. You have yet to do that. The protesters have yet to that. It's a bunch of demanding grease but the wheel is nowhere to be found.
And then theyтАЩll tell you it should be square
I understand what you're saying and and I understand your frustration with the protesters.
Apple trees grow apples. If you want something other than apples, you need a different tree, you can't just prune the branches a certain way.
I am not just talking about climate change, which I think is already so far advanced that the best we can do is mute the effects, especially since I think a lot of it is due to natural cycles. Still it is incumbent on us to do everything we can.
There are a whole host of other issues which climate change has sucked all the attention from but which are still essential to our survival as a society.
My point is that we need ecological sustainability as the underlying principle of any economy. All the details will logically flow from that. If we really adopt that as an underlying principle, then our whole economic system, (whether it's capitalism, socialism or communism, they're all materialism), is in conflict with that and needs to change, meaning we need a totally different way of going about how we do things. If we don't do it for ourselves nature will do it for us.
You can put all the protesters in jail and silence them but that's not going to make all the serious problems of the world ecological situation go away. The protesters may be a massive pain in the ass but I'm not sure how else anybody is going to start thinking about the real problems of the ecology because as long as they are left in peace most people will simply ignore the problems, or at best give lip service to them.
The very first lesson anybody teaches a child is that you can't do everything you want and get away with it. We need to learn that as a species, This Society needs a strong dose of vision and wisdom.
Then focus on giving people concrete solutions and dispelling bad ideas with facts. Progress is not found in wishes and wants nor is it accomplished in an instant. I find that if I articulate something specific to people, they listen. Most people try, particularly conservatives, because conserving the Earth is part of being conservative. Complaining in generalities doesn't accomplish anything and laying down in traffic to complain in generalities only annoys people.
When my son was 5, he gave some adult a great life lesson and a great story for me to exemplify my point. We were in SoCal for a month for him to have an operation for a rare condition. Ever met those kids with encyclopedic knowledge about a particular subject? That's him about biosystems throughout Earth's history. We stayed where the LA River dumps into the Pacific. To say the amount of trash and smog that surrounded us in SoCal was shocking is an understatement. It still hurts our hearts.
Anyway, he wanted to do something, so he got this huge stick and started pulling plastic bags from the mouth of the river as they flowed by. I grabbed them from his stick and threw them away. Some grumpy couple in their early 20's walked by and they guy looked at him and said, "there isn't a point in what you are doing, it's not going to change anything." My son calmly looked him directly in the eye and said, "that sea turtle I just saved disagrees with you."
No one person can save the planet. No amount of temper tantrums accomplishes anything. But every day, in or own way, we can each save one sea turtle, and together we accomplish a lot.
Setting an example matters. Stop focusing on what you think everyone else "should" be doing and focus on what you can accomplish yourself. Its more productive and far more rewarding.
You lament destruction then support destroying one of our speciesтАЩ greatest contributions.
Have you considered not being retarded?
Never go full retard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y3FzVQi-R8